On Gimme Some Oven, Ali creates fresh, creative, quick and easy recipes for sharing, and does all the photo taking, recipe creating, food styling and taste tasting for her blog. Apart from her recipes, Ali shares plenty of beauty, craft, fashion and gift DIYs, as well as music and movies just to mention a few other things she writes about.

I am so happy to have Ali Ebright of Gimme Some Oven joining me here on the show today.

(*All photos below are Ali’s.)

On Her Blog:

I began the blog about six years ago back in 2009, and I began it just totally as a hobby, for fun. At the time, I was definitely in the process of still teaching myself how to cook and a bunch of my friends did not cook. So it was the sort of thing where I’d go to a party and people are always asking for recipes. So once I stumbled upon the idea and format of a blog, I decided it would be a great way to just organize my recipes and be able to share them with a half dozen friends. It ended up growing from there, but it began just totally as a fun, creative outlet and a place to just help myself organize recipes.

I was actually a musician prior to this.

I worked at a church for many years leading music and then I also taught music lessons on the side. So cooking was just a total hobby. I knew nothing about photography, and I’ve always enjoyed writing and reading. But no, I had zero experience in just about all of the major aspects of blogging especially the tech side. I knew nothing about how to create a website or any of that. But it’s been a fun thing to learn.

On Honing Her Skills:

Back in the day before there were just a ton of food bloggers on the scene and so many resources out there, I did a lot of Googling. I did a lot of research the old fashion way by talking to photographers or talking to writers or people who were much better cooks than I was, just trying to have them actually teach me one on one. But now, I can go to YouTube for any of that. I think I’m naturally somebody who loves to learn and teach myself things. So it was fun to be able to begin in all of these things like begin as a very amateur photographer and see where I needed to go and slowly inch my way there towards taking photos that I felt okay with.

It’s been step-by-step, like beginning photos on my blog, to beginning recipes, even beginning writing. I think most food bloggers look back on where they began and have a little bit of a cringe moment. On the other hand, I try and see it as progress. Any time that I get down on myself where I feel like I am not as good as I would like to be, I can always look back to some of those first years especially and be like, “Oh yeah, don’t forget, you’ve come a long way.”

On Her Curiosity Around Food and Cooking:

I think more than anything, I love to eat but also even more than that, I’ve always been just fascinated by the idea of what happens when people share a meal together. That life around the table. I feel like it’s such a special way that people connect in something that’s so fun and nourishing. Food has always been a very social thing for me, not that every meal is social but those are the meals that I’m really inspired to cook. And any time that you can have good people around and have good conversations, I’m all for any of that. Even back in the day, that was my main motivation, just to teach myself how I could cook a healthy meal.

On Learning How to Cook:

By trial and error. My mom is a fantastic cook, and she cooked really well balanced and pretty healthy meals for us growing up. Almost every night, we had dinner on the table and we sat around together, but she was also one of those moms that, for whatever reason, never really made me help her that much. So, somehow, I got to college and I knew a little bit but not much. And by the time I was introduced to cafeteria food and quickly realized how good I had had it, I also realized I didn’t know how to cook any of my mom’s special dishes.

And so it was definitely in college when I had my first apartment with a kitchen that I started just experimenting and figuring out how to make some of the basics. But then, from there, especially in my 20s, I just really enjoyed the process of following a recipe. With recipes, most of the time, they work. There are the occasional duds, but I felt like it was a pretty successful experiment learning to cook. Most of the time, things turned out the way I had hoped and so I really enjoyed it.

On Deciding on What to Cook for Her Blog:

A lot of the recipes on there are random cravings or foods that I wanted to learn how to make just personally. But as time has gone on, a lot of it is definitely geared much more towards my readers, and I keep a running log of the different requests that they make. We’ve had literally hundreds of requests now for a crock pot potato soup. Apparently, everybody loves potato soup, but they really want to know how to make it in a crock pot. So today, that was a recipe that was an example. I have a stove top potato soup that I love, but they really wanted a crockpot version.

So yeah, trying to find a good mix of things that different people want to eat and even with the different diets and such, that kind of goes back to my love of entertaining, too. I feel like whenever I have people over, I have lots of friends who are vegan or gluten-free or have different food intolerances. And I’ve always said that my blog is never going to be a niched diet blog. It will never be all gluten-free. But, I totally want to make sure that there are recipes on there that different people can enjoy completely.

On Her Food Heroes:

I’m actually that one weird food blogger who hardly ever watches food TV. I’ve never had cable, and I occasionally catch things on YouTube. But I think for sure, Rachael Ray was probably the first person, her 30 Minute Meals. That’s just how I cook, and I love that she is one of those pioneers in the industry who’s made cooking really approachable and easy and geared toward families. Just being able to make it possible to get a healthy and well-balanced meal on the table quickly. I am a big fan of hers. I saw her. She came through Kansas City, where I live, and did a book tour like a year or two ago, and I heard her speak. And I was like, “Man, the girl knows what she’s doing.” She was really impressive and I think, more than anything, I realize how hard she’s worked at her career and so I really respect her.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Honestly, probably the only one that I watch regularly is Chopped. I really like Chopped.

What are some food blogs or food websites we have to know about?

One of my best friends in Kansas City is Cookie and Kate who I believe was actually on your podcast before. Kate from Cookie and Kate, she has a fantastic vegetarian blog. For a vegan, I highly recommend Minimalist Baker. John and Dana are just fantastic, talented cooks.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram, or Facebook or Snapchat that make you happy?

On Instagram, I am a big fan of Pumpkin the Raccoon. I don’t know if anybody follows Pumpkin. It’s literally a pet raccoon. It’s just the absolute cutest. I am also a big fan of the Two Sisters Angie on Instagram, which is also under the hashtag fashionbymayhem. It’s this really sweet little girl who makes these super creative dresses out of paper. It’s just a fascinating account. Other than that, there’s just a zillion food accounts out there that I also love to follow for inspiration.

What is the most unusual or treasured item in your kitchen?

I have a pretty normal kitchen. I do have a dehydrator that was my Christmas gift from Santa when I was 16 years old. I’ve always had a long obsession with beef jerky. So even as I’ve lived in teeny tiny kitchens, I’ve always made room for my little dehydrator which takes up more space than it should.

Name one ingredient you used to dislike but now you love.

Brussel sprouts. I am obsessed. I feel like they were given such a bad rap when we were young. They were always boiled or something super boring. They are so good roasted.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Anything from America’s Test Kitchen. I am 32, so I feel like I’ve been through a zillion weddings in the last decade of life, and I give America’s Test Kitchen’s New Best Recipe Book to all my friends who get married because I feel like it will never fail, and I love the research behind their recipes. They have a cooking for two. Yeah, anything of theirs, I just 100% recommend.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I have music on all the time when I cook. I mean, we’re always happy. Cooking makes me happy. So I feel like, any song that makes me want to dance in the kitchen, that’s always a plus. But currently, Adele’s new album is on full-time.

Sara is a self proclaimed food blog and cookbook junkie, but above all, she is an artist.

Where many food blogs have super stylized photography that follow their recipes and posts, Sara illustrates many of the featured images on her blog Cake Over Steak, and they are crazy cool.

I am so pumped to have Sara Cornelius from Cake Over Steak joining me on the show today.

On Her Day Job:

I create custom hand etchings on gravestones, and you might think what the heck does that mean. Essentially, I illustrate pictures on granite with the Dremel tool. But we also have a laser machine that can laser etch photo quality images. It works like a laser printer but it is actually laser etching the granite.

I also create the files for that and operate the laser. We do actual pictures on some, or we use that to do texts sometimes, but the more fun part of my job is I create real custom scenes and things for people. Around here, it usually involves deer, cabins and tractors or things like that. Also, houses and beach scenes, so it’s really neat.

For most of the texts that we do, we sandblast that and a lot of that is done by machines and rubber stencils that is put over it, but we also have a guy in our sandblasting shop that hand carves roses. My boss says that he is the best guy in the East Coast doing that and he is really talented. So that is another art aspect at my office.

It’s really fun for me because now that I am in this industry, when I see old graveyards, I get really excited. I creepily go look at it, especially the really old stuff. I love seeing the designs from the ’20s and their kind of designs. You just get this whole new appreciation for it as a craft.

On Starting Her Blog:

At first I started reading food blogs and I thought this is really cool but I will never do this. There is no way I would ever do this and then I guess slowly over time I thought maybe I could do this. It seems like such a nice way to record your life. I like how people could weave a story about their life into a post with a banana bread recipe. You see how people put their own personality into them and you get to know these people through their blog.

I thought well maybe this would be something fun to do but I thought I can’t come up with my own recipes and I am not a photographer, and I would want to have good photography. Then I realized duh, I’m an illustrator. I could do the illustrations, but then I thought, well, I still wanted to have photos.

It took a while for me to actually start it. It took me like two years to come up with a name for my blog, so that was holding me back for a while. But when I started dating my husband, he is a photographer, I convinced him to take my photos for me.

It’s funny because we got engaged two months or so before I actually launched the blog, but I had already been working on it for a couple months behind the scenes. It was kind of funny because when we got I engaged I thought, “Okay then, I know I have a photographer for my blog for long term.” It’s not just that I am getting a husband, I’m getting a full time blog photographer until he gets totally sick of it and forces me to take my own. But I told him he has to teach me before it comes to that.

On Working With Her Husband:

He started his own blog back in June so sometimes it’s a push and pull where he wants to go work on his blog first. But he is a really good sport about it. I feel like people don’t realize how much of a saint he is unless you witness one of our photo-shoots together.

I am a total control freak and I think that because I am not in control of photography as much as I would like to be, it can be so frustrating to me. If the lighting is not good in the one afternoon that we have to do it, I’m like, “I don’t understand there is light on the table, why can’t the camera take this picture that I see in my head.” But he is really good about it.

With us both being artists, but totally different kinds of artists, we can feed off of each other and not be too competitive with each other. Because we are both very competitive people. But for example, I never say I am done with one of my illustrations until he sees it and doesn’t have anything to change. When he is working on one of his crazy composite photography images, he doesn’t call it done until I have seen it either. We are always asking each other for advice and he shows me Photoshop tricks for my illustrations which I do mostly digitally and things like that.

But also, when you are in a relationship with someone like that, I can tell exactly what I think and know that he is not going to freak out on me and stuff like that.

I think that we are really honest with each other.

On the Connection Between Food and Artistry:

I didn’t get into the field until college. I have always been into art as long as I can remember. It just has always been a part of me. Food, I started getting into near the end of college when I moved off campus and had my own apartment, and my own kitchen, and had to feed myself. I think needing to feed myself in my brain I was like, “If I am going to do this, I am going to do this really well.”

I have always loved baking and I was never super into cooking real food. But I think that’s because I just have such a sweet tooth that I have never been that into real food or at least I thought I wasn’t. But I don’t think I found the foods that I really loved until college when I was introduced to them. Like discovering things when you meet new people and you’re in a new place and everything.

That started to grow in college and then for my junior thesis project I did a cookbook. I mean it wasn’t actually a cookbook; it was like you pretend you are doing this big project then you do two to three pieces for it. So I did it as a cookbook and I did some food paintings. They are actually hanging in the kitchen of my parent’s house.

In my senior year for one of my graphic design classes I did actually design a cookbook. So I started moving it into my college projects. I was so burnt out from college that aside from my job, I took the other areas of my life off from art because my senior year was so intense. I started my full time job three weeks after I graduated so it was just no stopping. I gave my brain a break from art for a bit which I think was a really good choice, and instead, I would just bake cookies.

I did get to indulge in that other passion but slowly I started thinking more and more about doing the food blog again. What that would be and what I wanted it to be like, and eventually, it turned out to be what it is now.

On the Person Who Influenced Her Cooking:

It would be my really good friend Jackie from college. She was really into cooking and I remember thinking that’s so weird. Because even though my mom always had a home-cooked meal for us at home almost every night – family sits down for dinner and it’s homemade and everything like that, my mom didn’t love cooking and she still doesn’t. I think she might have if we hadn’t been such picky and annoying children. I really feel for her now looking back on that.

Being that my friend Jackie was really into it, I started cooking with her every now and then in college. Actually, when I started becoming friends with her, it was my freshman year and I went to school in Philly. That day, she had walked to the Italian market, which is kind of a long walk, just to buy a rolling pin because she wanted to bake a pie.

I met up with her when she got back to the house. She said, “Hey, I’m going up to the penthouse in the dorm to make a pie, do you want to help me?” So I said, “Sure!” and then my best friend and roommate came out to join us, and a couple of other friends, and we ended up going outside to eat this pie. We bought ice cream and some other things and it was as the cherry blossom trees were blooming right in front us.

That is the night we all became really good friends. So then every year after that we celebrated our pie night and we would have pie and ice cream when the trees bloomed. That was really cool. I would say she’s the first person I knew who really loved cooking that influenced me. But then once I started reading food blogs. It was really food bloggers who got to me more.

On How She Decides on What to Cook:

That’s a good question because I don’t make as much as I want to.

I have cookbooks that I have not even cooked from, that’s ridiculous. Sometimes a recipe grabs me so much that I literally put it on my to-do list. If I know I can’t make it that day, I’ll think why do I have this going on this night, but I have this day off and I could make this then, and I will put it on my to-do list for that day.

Every once in awhile it’s kind of like the luck of the draw where I have everything in my kitchen to make it or something like it and then it’s like, “Ooh this is what I will make for dinner tonight!”

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter that make you happy?

Every morning I check in with a couple of Instagrams. My two favorites involve people with children, the one her name is Momma’s Gone City. Theo and Beau?

She is a mommy blogger but her family adopted a puppy like a year ago and this dog naps on their two-year-old son every day.

It’s so cute.

And then also food blogger Bev Cooks, she had twins like a year ago, a boy and a girl, and she posts really great pictures of them every day. She also adds hilarious captions so that is one of my favorites.

What is something all home cooks should have in their pantry?

I think everyone should have a microplane zester because if you have ever tried to zest a lemon or whatever without one, it makes me want to kill myself.

Those make it so easy and they are also the best for grating parmesan cheese.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

Chocolate. Milk chocolate.

I guess with baking I use more of semi-sweet but flavor-wise there’s like Icelandic chocolate bars, something they sell at Whole Foods, that I used to get in college, and I think my favorite was 33%.

It’s great, it comes in this plane white paper, it looks really nondescript but it’s two layers of chocolate. So it’s technically two bars and they are pretty big. They have all these squares but they have a couple of different percentages, but I liked the 33 and the 55.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I mentioned the Smitten Kitchen one, I love that one. I love Keys to the Kitchen by Aida Mollenkamp, that is one of my all time favorites. That one just has so many great recipes. My favorite pesto is from there. But that one is fun because each recipe teaches you a technique. So if you wanted to do just a basic recipe, you could leave out some of the crazy seasonings or whatever, but it also gives you a new interesting take on it. I think that is a great one for a beginner cook who is a little adventurous.

Another one I turn to a lot is one of the first cookbooks I ever got. It’s called Fast, Fresh and Green and it’s all about cooking vegetables. But it has it broken down by cooking technique and within each chapter it gives you a breakdown of if you are using this vegetable, cut it to this size, and do it for this time for this method. It has a bunch of great sauces and different ideas for things so I turn to that a lot.

I think that’s one of the things that I love about trying new recipes, because you almost always learn something and then I can use that to come up with my own version later.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Probably Dean Martin’s greatest hits. I really love the Rat Pack old style stuff. I think that makes me want to chill out in the kitchen and cook up some really good pasta.

Keep Posted on Sara:

There is always my blog cakeoversteak.com. I am also on Twitter and Instagram mostly. I put a lot of recipes on Pinterest. I’m not super interactive on that, mostly just to hoard recipes on it.

Hello! I'm Gabriel Soh, home cook, food enthusiast and your host of The Dinner Special podcast.
Everything here on The Dinner Special is an experiment, just like with cooking. Thank you for listening and being part of the adventure.